Thanks, Marialena. I knew I had seen that post before but wasn’t able track it down. What are your feelings on color depth?

The colours you see on your screen will never have the same depth with the colours you see on the original painting and that because your screen is lighted from its back while your paintings reflect the light.

No matter how well you can edit any image after scanning any painting, the original will always have better colour balance and depth, and will always look somehow smoother because the scanner magnifies the images too, and you, on the other hand, don’t want them to have such high resolution when you post them online.

So there is no salvation on this matter. You’ll have to compromise with something that looks like your painting, and those who see it to keep in mind that this is how about it looks like and not how the original actually looks like.
They can take an idea of the painting. The originals look always better.

P.S Unless you have the super duper high end super expensive equipment and you know on top of that, how to use it up to its limits… there is unlimited budget, time and expertise to have the top quality images.
I personally prefer to spend my budget on art materials and my time to make paintings and not photographing scanning, editing them…

To get the best colour depth, you new a digital camera that supports RAW format and photo editing s/w that also supports RAW. Even then you may/will loose some of the gamut depending of the particular camera. 10 megapixel will work for most size pictures unless you want to do fine art poster size prints in which case start with a 20 megapixel camera or better.

One tip I was taught by a portrait photographer; use a long (longer) focal length lens plus a tripod, and stand well back, 15 to 20 feet, to photograph your art. It flattens the field and reduces distortion near the edges.

As I am preparing images for print, I have moved past cell phone pix and on to scanning images. With anything larger than 8.5″ x 11″ (which is virtually everything I paint) I scan multiple images and use the Photomerge feature in Photoshop to stitch them together, which yields a passable image. Passable isn’t good enough.

Admittedly my scanner is not the best. It was bought without considering scanning artwork, but it isn’t bad either. One problem that it has is that the color depth is 24-bit vice 48-bit. Is this an issue with a watercolor scan? With a photo, I would say yes, but with a watercolor, I don’t know.

The other issue I have is that there is a bezel around the glass (for regular papers to butt up against) that causes larger paintings to “float” at the edges, and bow in at the middle, which leaves scan artifacts, something like a halo around the individual images. I can crop these out, but it becomes very time-consuming.

So my questions are:
[INDENT]1) Is there a best practices way to scan images into one?
2) What is a better scanner than the EPSON V19, that is still affordable? (features need to include: larger image size, smaller bezel, greater color depth,)[/INDENT] Thoughts?

I gave using a scanner as a camera a try many years ago and there was lots of info on the interweb then. It might interest you just for interests sake.

Even if you get a perfect scan you are still in the hands of the printer when it comes to colour balance.

Doug